Half Life

When she relapsed, the challenge wasn't finishing a 13.1-mile race. It was getting to the starting line

I have been a dedicated runner for almost 20 years. To get in my daily run, I have braved the four seasons and all types of physical illnesses, including the side effects of chemotherapy for breast cancer. Snow? Soft and pretty underfoot. Traveling? I love new neighborhoods. Medically induced baldness? Let 'em stare. The payoff has been a strong and fit body and a well-balanced emotional state. My run isn't optional, and hasn't been for years. It's my healthy obsession.

Last fall a runner friend suggested I try a race--the Adirondack Half-Marathon. He thought it would be a good first long race because it has a small field. In all my years of running, I had never needed the goal of a race to get out and moving. thought that starting-line tension and finish-line sprints were overrated, and really don't like crowds. But I had been trying to do something adventurous every summer since I had finished chemo two years earlier, and this fit the bill.

It turned out to be exhilarating. We ran around Schroon Lake, ending at a beach. loved the people I met along the hilly course, the scenery, the massage and dip in the lake at the end, and being able to say I'd run 13.1 miles. Plus, I got a big kick out of the announcer saying, "And all the way from New York City, Noirin Lucas," as I crossed the finish line in 2:04.

I am definitely doing this again next year, I thought. And I'm going to break two hours. It didn't matter that it hurt to sit down for close to a week. I'd be back.

SOON AFTER THE RACE, I became friendly with a neighbor, Denise, who had also just run her first half-marathon. We started training and racing together with Terry, a friend of hers. We all entered the lottery for the New York City Half-Marathon, and when I was the only one to get in, Denise joked that she and Terry would become Team Noirin and help me train for it.

I had been bitten by a new kind of running bug. Now I understood the pull of checking your results and thinking about the next race and trying to better your time. Blisters and aches aside, racing was a revelation. It got me into running in a whole new way. And my friendship with Denise and Terry grew with each mile.

Then something changed the game.

In early December, I ran a 10-K in Central Park with Denise and Terry. Since I had no record with New York Road Runners, I started in the back. Boy, was it fun to pass people. I ran an 8:33 pace (good enough for 24th in my age group), but afterward experienced pain in a rib. It took a few days before I went to the emergency room. I wasn't in a hurry because I knew you can't do much for a broken rib. You also can't do much, I thought, for something else that was discovered by the ER doctor that day. He said I had a nodule on my lung, and given my history, I should definitely have follow-up tests.

At the end of December, I learned that my breast cancer had probably metasta-sized. The shock was particularly intense because I'd seen my oncologist just three months before and there had been no warning signs. From the high of feeling as fit as I ever had at the beginning of the month, I'd been handed a death sentence.
I kept thinking about the New York City Half-Marathon a few months away and wondering not if I'd be running in it but if I'd even be alive for it. Just when I'd fallen more in love than ever with something, it was going to be taken away from me. My husband and I spent a gloomy Christmas not knowing what was ahead.

When I finally got to sit down with my oncologist in January, I was at a real low. Over the phone she had told me it was definitely metastasis; I knew that meant the cancer would never be fully defeated.

So when she said that people live for years with this disease, that they raise their kids and go to work with it, my husband and I wept happily. We'd been thrown a lifeline. The treatment was regular injections of an estrogen-receptor-blocking drug and a bone strengthener, and would go on for as long as it was effective. There were other options if it stopped working. But I'd be running the New York Half after all.

On race day, Terry and Denise stood outside my corral, two-thirds of the way back in the crowd of 10,000, and kept me amused with wry grumbles about lucky lottery winners. I finally began trotting, and experienced a flash of acute awareness as I crossed the starting line. I understood the meaning of the word momentous for the first time. My urge to survive was concentrated into a tiny moment.

Friends and family were strategically placed along the route to help spur me along. I knew by mile nine or so that I would probably beat two hours. Now it was down to my legs to figure out by how much. I was determined to give it my all.

During the final push along West Street, the runners got pumped. "Let's do this!" one man shouted as he passed me.

I finished in 1:54:33, in the top quarter of my age group. I had beaten my Adirondack time by almost 10 minutes! Accepting my medal, I might have had an extra reason to feel special, but I think all of us who crossed the line that day did.

I hugged my husband and my sons, so happy and proud. There were tears in all our eyes. I wanted to do it again and again. But cancer was there, reminding me I could never count on that.

Running couldn't prevent my disease, and will never heal me. Metastatic breast cancer is not like heart disease or obesity, where exercise can be the answer.

But running can give me answers about my life: I'm a mother. I'm a competitor. I'm a friend. And I'm a runner. For as long as I can, I'm going to look for these answers every day.